* Shorten is a pragmatist;
* Look what happened to the Libs because of Work Choices;
* Mutterings in the ranks;
* Irresistable mandates;
* Carbon pricing is unfashionable, the Carbon War has been fought and lost;
* The polls;
* Electricity will be cheaper;
*The Libs will keep the compensation…

… everything but

* The Earth is warming at a catastrophic rate.

When Kenny refers to the “Carbon War”, he doesn’t mean the battle against global warming.

He means some obscure political numbers shitfight, some argument about who’s wedged who, some ill-informed dross concerning $100 dollar roasts, business profits, faction fighting, opinion polls and biased newspaper coverage like his own, backed by billionaires with an anarchist, no-government agenda. Rising temperatures around the world don’t get a look-in.

It’s all politics, all calculation, all polls and wedges and numbers, and worse…. the “look of things”.

This is the world of Mark Kenny and his ilk. Everything is distilled down to who’s up who, no matter the gravity of the core policy.

They don’t seem to give a damn about the issue and the science at the heart of this debate. They only care about being on the drip feed, showing off how savvy they are, and how connected, how hard-nosed and how cynical.

We’ve just seen the worst fires in a decade and it’s not even summer. Whole townships have been wiped out for all practical purposes. There’s more to come, but political animal, urger and spruiker extraordinaire, Mark Kenny can only see the numbers.

The man has talent. He’s good at what he does. But just imagine… if he and his colleagues gave up their time to urge the public to be sensible about global warming, to consider the catastrophe, the “look” if you like, of a country that has in turn the world’s worst pollution record, combined with the world’s richest people, actually abandoning action on carbon pricing because it claims it’s too poor to do anything about it, they would do a lot more good for us, themselves and their kids than the drivel written and published today.

What will other countries think of the morality of battling climate change when the world’s worst climate offender, made rich by digging up polluting coal and selling it to other carbon addicts, abrogates responsibility for its own actions, and abandons the world to its fate, because the local political numbers just weren’t there.

The forth estate is totally corrupt and rationally irrelevant…an echo-chamber for the vested interests..there is no longer ANY journalist that writes for the forth estate that is not infected through direct contact or by association with the filth of society.
They are ALL yesterdays’ people.

Rounding up brown pregnant women and sending them to sleep in tents on an island surely ill-equipped to handle their medical needs, just so a few babies don’t have citizenship rights a decade from now, is one of the lowest acts of bastardry Morrison could think up. That he is doing it shows what a low bastard he is.

No-one ever seems to query how we will meet our commitments to reduce emissions. Where/ who will plant the trees and nurture them in our climate. We will be up for penalties with overseas traders down the track if we are not contributing to lower emissions. That will cost in dollar terms – not to mention morally!

The blocking of varying viewpoints can be seen at online news sites, I notice many stories don’t come with the ability of the readers to comment on said story. Also, the ones that do will close off comments in damn quick time, esp the ABC. The incoming comments are moderated so as to block enough of the dissenting views as to make it appear there is little disagreement with what has been written.

Scott Buchholz, federal LNP Member for Wright, has been very lavish with our money. In the second half of 2011 he spent $466,834.70 on an office fit-out. It must be quite some office. He must have bought himself some extremely nice furniture. Perhaps he too had some bookshelves custom made. He probalbly needed them because in the same period he spent around $2000 on kids’ books – four pages of them are listed in his entitlements claims. They weren’t for his own kids either, he has one daughter, she’s about 17 and far too old to be reading Dora the Explorer – Hide and Seek or Baby Animal Stories. I suppose Mr B will, when eventually questioned, say the books were gifts to local schools or whatever. Fair enough, but should we be paying for this sort of ‘generosity’?http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/parliamentarians-reporting/docs/T29/BUCHHOLZ_Scott.pdf

It’s interesting that Kenny writes for the SMH. He’s touted as their “Chief Political Correspondent”.

The SMH editorialized in favour of a vote for Labor in the election, in great part because of their ETS policy, stating that action on Global Warming was vital for both our nation’s future and that of the world.

Kenny doesn’t seem to have got the message.

To reduce action on Global Waring to a sequence of wedges, numbers, polls, and phoney mandates – without any mention of the core issue – shows just where political commentary has gotten to.

Reading Kenny’s article you’d have thought that the bushfires raging at the moment (and due to flare up again next week) had not happened. You could have been forgiven for thinking that the Artcic ice wasn’t melting at record rates. Or that more droughts and cyclones – the product of wildly raging weather – weren’t forecast for this summer.

To Kenny, and to most political commentators, everything can be reduced to interactions between humans.

You can sort-of understand it… politics takes little note of reality. It’s all about spin, appearances and politicians behaving in the way that political commentators believe they should behave, There’s a sort of science to it… polls are its metrics, and political opinion writers interpret the polls.

But they also affect the polls. How else could a competent government, like Gillard’s be written off, almost from the get-go, in ignorance of all its legislative and policy achievements, as dysfunctional? This is a particularly pertinent question given the parlous state of the House – a hung parliament.

If you look at a drop of water, you can see beauty and wonderful light, the world refracted through a tiny amount of clear liquid. You see cohesiveness – surface tension keeps it all together in simple, yet amazing harmony.

Or you can look at it through a microscope. It will be teeming with life, raging in battle, microbe against microbe in a ceaseless, yet pointless war of attrition.

The latter view is closer to how political commentators see politics. IF there is calm they look for conflict. If there is established fact – scientifically proven, grave and threatening – they seem to believe that mere opinion (theirs or someone else’s) is enough to outweigh, even totally obscure that fact.

At its most trivial we see the endless He-said/She-said battle in the media. At its worst we get columns like Kenny’s today.

I assume Kenny has kids, or relatives that he cares about. But you wouldn’t know it from reading his pieces, especially this one. He has reduced the entire problem, the looming catastrophe of Global Warming to a simple matter of interactions between puny humans in suits, wedging, polling about and arguing with each other. It’s as if Global Warming is just some kind of abstract political problem, a game, something for Kenny to write about and show off how well-connected he is, by quoting insiders, polls, and disputed theories of what the words “political mandate” means.

He would no doubt argue that politics is “The Art Of The Possible” or some similar cliche. Or, alternatively, that he is a political correspondent, not a “science” correspondent. That, of course, is true. But where is Kenny’s humanity, especially in this week where hundreds of families have lost everything due to un-seasonal bushfires, the product of record shattering high temperatures?

It’s not even summer, where the real high temperatures will most likely create more misery and loss, yet all Kenny can waffle on about is some game – a zero sum game at that – that political tragics and cynical numbers men examine in minutae, as if it was the teeming,microbial war being fought inside a drop of water. Yes, it is a war, but it doesn’t matter a hill of beans compared to what will happen if we don’t get off our collective arses and, as the world chief polluters, as well as its richest ones, do something meaningful about Global Warming to show the world an example of real repentance, not the phoney Abbott version that is all short-term point scoring.

As long as political pundits treat Global Warming as an economic, or worse, a purely political problem – a matter of political science, rather than real science – one that determines who can remain in office sucking perks off the public tit while the World fries and millions are devastated, we will make little progress in combatting it.

It’s time for the core argument to be made. As Wendy Harmer puts it (ironically in the same newspaper):

Is this what the future is like??
Whether or not it’s unseemly for Greens politicians to raise the spectre of future cataclysmic climate change when bushfires are still raging out of control, there’s no doubt that many of us who looked up to bruised and belligerent skies swirling with ash and a drift of incinerated gum leaves had to wonder, ”is this what the future will be like”?

Yes, well, it will be what the future is like as long as Global Waring is seen not as the greatest disaster-in-waiting, if an entirely avoidable one, that humanity faces today.

It will be what the future is like as long as the Mark Kennys and the Tony Abbotts of this world see it is just another wedge issue.

It will be what it is like if we fail to listen to the drumbeat of impending catastrophe and instead, like empty vessels, make a lot of noise about petty, political machinations that will do nothing at all to stop Global Warming and everything possible to hasten our doom as a species.

I’ve just seen Doyleym’s excellent post, and feel I should join him in his plea concerning what really matters on this vital subject.

The case needs to be argued on its merits. It needs to be argued without excuses, and in defiance of the the hecklers who tell us that it’s never the right time to do so. By their logic, the more bushfires and droughts and cyclones that hit us, the less appropriate it is to discuss the core issue. This is the ridiculous line of argument that gives gun nuts in America almost free reign to spread their vile implements of death everywhere, even into schools and churches… and parliaments.

Labor should quit the useless He-said/She-said bits-and-pieces arguments about percentage points and inflation increments. It should abandon the stupid “electricity bills” argey bargey and the futile attempts to pull Direct Action to pieces by criticising its individual elements. There’ll always be someone to counter these lines of argument with more minutae, more belly fluff that gets a run in the papers, yet signifies nothing.

It’s time to come to the core of the matter: we either do something meaningful, and examplary to fight Global Warming, or we die.

msad’ yes, I’ve noticed that too, esp’ on the ABC….a cunning stunt, though I have to wonder to whom such manipulated opinion is directed at?…seeing as how it is mainly the on-line bloggers who mostly read the commentry!..Perhaps they are fooling themselves into thinking everyone thinks like them…I notice there are fewer and fewer left-wing posters there now. I don’t even bother pretending I’ll get anything up anymore…in the few times I go there, I just take the mick out on the moderator!

leone, a letter to Scott Buchholz’s local paper, the Beaudesert Times (once a private business owned by a local family but recently bought by Fairfax Regional Media), could be enlightening.
Most of those books are for pre-schoolers, so I doubt they could have been for say school prize presentations. His electorate does contain a significant number of meat poultry producers – but the books listed are about home/hobby poultry, not industrial-scale, so doubtfully relevant as background reading in representing his electorate’s interests.
As for the office fit-out – his office is in the main street of Beaudesert. $466k seems an extraordinary amount to have spent in a town where the median individual income is $437.00 per week and the median household income is $853.00 per week.

I believe that Labor is at it’s best, when they have causes to fight for. They do not seem to get any respect for delivering good times.

A time always comes, when the right set out to remove what Labor has put in place.

When one looks at political history in this nation, is the fact, Labor builds for the future. The right, demolishes and attempts to recreate the past.

O’Farrell has found that we exist on the Central Coast. I believe they are doing containment burning behind me. I hope that is true.

How there was only four homes lost, is a miracle. They guided that racing fire, between small, isolate villages, for over thirty kilometers.

As this fire seemed to have reignited where the one of four weeks ago, left off. We have a worrying time ahead, until we have some heavy rain, to put out all fire.

There is now a long narrow burnt area, that means is open to flaring up at anytime, and will be on long front. Both sides of the ribbon, is in heavily grassed and bush areas. It runs through the Munmorah National Park.

We have seen our local fires, in the area of the last fire, everyday. They were unable to prevent the flare up this week. The area is vastly larger to keep a eye on now.

I been knockin’ but I couldn’t get in! What’s happening with wordpress?

I don’t know about you guys but as alarming as the immigration and climate problems are (and in need of immediate attention) the thing that is scaring me most is the absolute stifling of ANY information coming out of govt.

I know people are going to accuse me of massive overreach but all the current goings on have a nasty whiff of pre-Nazi Germany.

Sitting here reading doyleym’s and bushfire bill’s posts and thinking one of the problems is that scientists cannot seem to convey their message in a convincing manner. I know this may sound strange, but I immediately recalled last night’s episode of Q.I., where one of the panel was a youngish Professor (physicist) from Manchester University. named Brian Cox. The subject matter of the show was the Universe and Space. It was quite an impressive performance, and having never heard of him before, I did some research. This is the kind of guy we need here in Australia to sell the message.
Check him out for yourself.

Can we have Bushfire Bill and Doyley M’s comments as tomorrow’s posts, if there is not another one ready, as I think they are important, well written and compliment each other and need sharing on the social media?

spacey
It surely will be. These LNP dinosaurs are living in a past where the messages can be controlled. No, you are not over the top with the hitler analogy, though I am more thinking of the USSR in the cold war era. It is not possible to control information anymore.

Confirmed on Thursday 17 one of the pregnant asylum seeker was transfered to an unknown hospital to #Australia from #Nauru.— Clint. Deidenang (@clintd22) October 19, 2013

So That Bastard Morrison wasn’t lying yesterday when he said there was no pregnant woman on Nauru. She’s already been taken away. He just didn’t bother telling us that at yesterday’s briefing because it’s just another of the things we are not allowed to know. If Morrison can break his ‘no exceptions’ rule on medical grounds why can’t we be told that? And why is he sending more pregnant women to Nauru?

Abbott has accused Bill Shorten of stealing Christmas because he won’t do what Abbott wants. Honestly, who is writing Abbott’s comedy lines these days. This stuff is beyond ludicrous.

The PM has also urged new Labor leader Bill Shorten to allow the scrapping of the carbon tax to pass through the parliament.

This week the government released planned legislation which Mr Abbott said would cut electricity prices by nine per cent, gas prices by seven per cent and provide an overall saving to Australian households of $550 a year.

“Wouldn’t that be a nice Christmas present to the people of Australia?,” he said.

“But who is the person who wants to steal Christmas, at least when it comes to abolishing the carbon tax?

“Well, it’s none other than the new leader of the opposition, good old electricity Bill Shorten.”

Mr Abbott said unless Mr Shorten was willing to accept the will of the Australian people his tenure as Labor leader was likely to be “very short indeed”.

Those remarks by PMBO are really lame. He is doing the lame loser so well lately, one would almost think it is inherent.

Take Tone the Fireman, who did what he always did when things got a bit tough for him in the public mind. He dressed up in yellow and waited for the accolades, and the forgiveness. It is just the same old Tony, right?

He is like the little kid who did the cute stuff all the time to get the olds to forgive him his naughty stuff, like tying a stone to the the cat’s tail. Now he’s the teenager who smiled at Dad while doing a handstand, after rolling the family’s new car down the drive into the rubbish bins.

He has was totally shocked when Dad kicked him up the arske and Mum threw his dinner in the bin.